Structural health monitoring of multi-spot welded joints using a lead zirconate titanate based active sensing approach

Failures of spot welded joints directly reduce the load capacity of adjacent structures. Due to their complexity and invisibility, real-time health monitoring of spot welded joints is still a challenge. In this paper, a lead zirconate titanate (PZT) based active sensing approach was proposed to monitor the structural health of multi-spot welded joints in real time. In the active sensing approach, one PZT transducer was used as an actuator to generate a guided stress wave, while another one, as a sensor, detected the wave response. Failure of a spot welded joint reduces the stress wave paths and attenuates the wave propagation energy from the actuator to the sensor. A total of four specimens made of dual phase steel with spot welds, including two specimens with 20 mm intervals of spot welded joints and two with 25 mm intervals, were designed and fabricated for this research. Under tensile tests, the spot welded joints successively failed, resulting in the PZT sensor reporting decreased received energy. The energy attenuations due to the failures of joints were clearly observed by the PZT sensor signal in both the time domain and frequency domain. In addition, a wavelet packet-based spot-weld failure indicator was developed to quantitatively evaluate the failure condition corresponding to the number of failed joints.